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Val Tarran
Parents Val is a Correllian, born in that sector and child of an otherwise unnotable merchant family based on that planet. Like most Correlians, Val was raised right in the middle of vice, corruption, and the easy fun of having loose morals around the notions of the legality of cargo - a thing she inherited straight from family involved in the business. Never wealthy, never poor, they got by and would have, by any point of comparison, had a rather normal, middle-class, nigh-forgotten existence... were it not for the rebellion. Early Years As Val grew up, she got her hands dirty. She learned to fly the family's transport fleet (mostly aging YTs on short-haul duties), and learned something about fixing them. Facinated by computer systems, and with the typical loose morals of a teenager, she even got into slicing as she got older and more sophisticated in her curiosity. While her life was not yet a rough-and-tumble thing without privelege, she envied the wealthy, admired the heartthrobs as they came through the HoloNet, and generally existed free from the politics that plagued other systems. When CorSec started cracking down on curfews and protestors, she barely took notice - caught up in hydrospanners, teen television shows, and freighter-runs. Her politics came later. Middle Years It was the Rebellion that changed everything. Her family joined in the clandestine intelligence work of the Bothans in league with Alderaan early on. With their small fleet of fast freighters, it was a simple thing to take on the occasional package, passenger, or datacrystal and get it into the right hands. Sure, there was profit in it - but there was also idealism, a sense of freedom, of supporting the right, that bouyed the captains and the owners. Of course, there's always the trouble with profit - someone always offers more. After the first death star was destroyed at Yavin, the intelligence-gathering of the Empire went into hyperdrive. The credits at their disposal were limitless... and eventually, proved too much temptation for one of the captains in the family's employ. He turned them in - the entire operation; some say this was the first major break IntSec got post-Yavin. Val escaped it thanks to her father - a man that put her in touch with the Republic intelligence community even as he was slated to be introduced to the tender mercies of Imperial interrogators. Val fell in with them then, older and wiser by far - and learned more. Far more. Once part of the Rebellion as a whole, she devoted herself to it: Slicing, flying, even training in blasters, linguistics... eventually, she became part of a loose, quasi-military spec-ops team, the sort used for very dirty work in the neverending search for intelligence. It was all part of the game, from here. Until Endor. Endor was where it all went wrong, where her team - part of the ground contingent on the Forest Moon - was taken and tried. She survived the interrogators, she survived the cold cruelty of the droids and the endless processing... and when they'd wrung her dry, when they'd gotten all they could from her, they dropped her in prison and forgot about her, battered, bruised and broken. Recent Events Six months ago, her sentence, along with several other non-ranking members of her unit, was commuted. Hardened by her time, dropping out into a galaxy on the losing side - no longer the idealist, no longer the dreamer, Val found herself trying to make a living with a criminal record and skills more suited to wartime than this peace, however dark it is. Her luck, though, came around. A Sabacc game with high stakes, betting on desperate money she didn't have, put her into a battered freighter and enough creds to get her running again. With a ship, they say, comes freedom - and opportunity. A home. And by the stars, both have been in short supply. Psyche Val is, above all else, a survivor. Oh, once she was an idealist, once she held to higher views - a thing that still nags at her - but surviving Interrogators and imperial prison takes a toll on even the most high-minded. She is tough. Fair. Honest and dishonest in turns, as it suits her and gets her to the next day. She's strong, and yet broken, adrift and surviving in a galaxy that's growing darker by the day. And yet - for all her bluster and hard exterior, she is /good/. She cares. And that, more than anything else, gets her into all sorts of trouble. Skills She can fly, and she can slice. She can shoot, and - Frankly, this old operative's eclectic. There's a handful of things that she does very, very well - pushing a freighter or working a deck are just the best of those. But in the end, Val has a bit of skill in just about anything she needs - she may not be the /best/ Sabacc player around, but she'll put in a good showing at the table. And sure, maybe she's not as slick as a conman, but she knows her way around a back alley, and can talk to the roughest. She's a true jack of all trades, a true master of none - but she's got a little bit of knowledge from a lot of places, and often has something to throw at the situation. Couple that with an ability to think on her feet, and she's a lot more dangerous than most expect. category: characters